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I finished ToEE after about 90 hours. Well I defeated Zuggtmoy after that time and assumed the game would end but more about that later As I mentioned its the best adaption of D&D rules and mechanics of any D&D game I have ever played and the combat strategy is always exciting I had many difficult fights and I loved how I would be defeated and then have to learn different spells or come back later. So for example when I was clearing the 2nd level of the High Priests I was able to defeat both the Air and Fire factions relatively easy by using a simple approach create a bottleneck in an entry passage so they have to advance through a limited space use AOE spells like Grease and Stinking Cloud so they get weakened this made is easier for my 2 tanks to fight combat against less enemies and I could use AOE spells in the bottleneck areas...Fireball is always my friend But this strategy failed with the Water High Priest because of the Juggernaut monster who was too powerful so I came back later at higher level and spells like Stoneskin and was successful after about 5 attempts Then I got Thrommels Sword as a reward for freeing him but only much later and that single weapon made a huge difference in battles, I gave it to my barbarian. This must be the best sword in the whole game? When I first got to the elemental nodes I thought I would be able to defeat most enemies using my standard strategy but I quickly learnt a hard lesson that wasn't going to work against the Demon bosses to get the gems. So I ended up using and learning buffs I typically wouldn't focus on like Remove Fear and ways to boost my saves against the Hezrou stench But these were all very challenging battles with the Balor being the hardest of all enemies but I persevered and Thrommels Sword made a huge difference Then I got to Zuggtmoy and ended up taking the gems and banishing her without a major final battle which I wanted. So I restored and waited for her to attack me and it was an incredibly difficult battle especially with all her fungus summons 4/8 of my party died in this final battle but I did kill her and I thought " wow, game over. That was exhilarating " But then you get to travel to Verbobonc for an massive expansion added by the Co8 mod , completely unexpected. Could my experience get any better So I have just started on the Verbobonc expansion and its really appreciated because I wasn't ready to stop playing this game

It must be so horrible for Sawyer and the other creative people at Obs right now. The two new IPs that they created with a lot of their passion and vision and talent and effort they have been ordered to kill/scrap/shelve (along with all other passion projects they may have been working on), and then they're ordered to all work on just one project that is an IP that belongs to someone else and over which thy won't have full creative control. I have to wonder if some of these people, including Sawyer himself, are contemplating just walking away from it all in disgust.

And now for something completely different

Drive, cheap hotel, poor sleep. Hubby in surgery. Maybe couple hours. Sitting in parking lot wondering if Im going yo nap or find a snack. Hopefully drive home tomorrow.

@ShadySands speak of the devil. Glad to see you're ok.

I didn't get any PMs so I assume it wasn't one the games I have listed. Though I probably have a hundred more to add by now

Project Hail Mary Really good. My wife and I both liked it a lot and shes not usually a fan of "sci-fi".

I had a really stupid idea and fed a part of my old MSN Messenger history to an LLM. I've been going over 20 year old messages I've exchanged with someone I once loved dearly, while listening to Blackmore's Night's cover of Joan Baez' Diamonds and Rust on repeat. The chat history is excessively personal at times and clocks in at almost a million words. We've basically written a short novel every other month back then. Not a particularily healthy place to be. Can't sleep. Stupid song is incredibly fitting, she was always really good with words, although that's an understatement. Brilliant, more like. Brilliant in more than one way though: eloquent, highly intelligent and empathetic. And, at times, cruel and manipulative. Turned everything into a joke. Especially the darkest of things. Given the time and intensity, you start developing your own compressed language and set of references. Like this: That was almost 19 years ago. I still know why she wrote that, what happened that day, and what exactly she meant. Linguistically, that's incredibly precise, painting the perfect picture with words.

But this is going to be exactly my dilemma when I play this game. I want all the bug fixes and gameplay improvements from mods such Co8 and Temple+, including especially such things as the level cap increase. But I'm really, really, really not interested in the additional challenging battles as someone who doesn't care for the combat parts of my RPG-playing experiences. The challenging battles in the base ToEE game sound bad enough, especially because that game does not come with an "easy" or "story" difficulty setting. 😟

Bethesda has officially confirmed a bunch of stuff that was unofficially already known. Most relevant for here: Obsidian is 100% working on a Fallout game, and there will be a remaster of FONV. Also FO5 is in preproduction, given it's Bethesda and what happened with TES6's announcement that may mean it doesn't even have a lead designer and is a decade away. Vaguely lol: not sure how great it looks saying Skyrim had 65mn sales, F4 35mn and Starfield 17mn. That's a bit of a drop off.

I think if I was Obsidian, my umbrella fear would be that this changing of things around by MS is their hail mary. eg, they (mostly, kind of) survived this round of MS cuts/restructuring etc, but if this new Fallout game they're being told to make (while canceling the others on top) doesn't hit big, Obs is gone (from MS anyway). I'm not sure if a new Obs-Fallout is going to be the actual marketing/sales success win-button re: the numbers that MS probably envisions/wants. I mean, I'd assume MS wants better than Avowed or Grounded sales and sees this path as the potential avenue for it. As others said, much probably also hinges on how much MS dictate/interfere with an Obs-vision. More big studio slop feeling or more old-school Obs-unique take etc.

Finished Mafia Definitive Edition. I wasn't going crazy, they did change the story quite a bit. The ending was pretty good. I'm going to play Mafia 3 next.

Living dangerously. Sister went to Riga to attend the Pitbull concert, kept giving her updates on the front. The concert got cancelled and now she is stuck there sightseeing Riga, they said the stage couldn't be secured in time whatever that meant... @Raithe good luck. When I was looking for a place I looked at dumps with a good layout, figured I would renovate it either way so why pay extra.

Agree 100%. For me as well, it's my single-player game, and even when the game itself doesn't acknowledge my RP choices and decisions, they matter greatly to me just to be able to make them within my game (including with character creation and development/leveling). So that's why, even when there are no consequences whatsoever, I won't rob from ordinary people and only from the elites, won't harm innocents, am happy to accept a fair price from merchants and won't steal from them, etc. It's why playing BG3 I refused to ever use the tadpoles or their powers even though there were no meaningful negative consequences and only powerful beneficial consequences. The whole point of playing an RPG, and why that genre of games is my thing, is to be able to play my game my way. And that's why I get really pissed off when developers won't give me certain freedoms or options within their game for me to be able to play the game my way. I suppose ToEE will now end up just sitting in my Steam library as a never-played game. I did do my due diligence looking at various youtube videos before I bought it. But I should've waited until someone here in this forum provided an honest and trustworthy appraisal. And now, that's exactly what I'll be doing with the PoR remake.

I just finished Botany Manor. It's a pretty nice puzzle and exploration game set in an English manor. The premise is to search rooms and follow clues to figure out how to grow various strange plants. It's quite relaxing and well-made. A good little experience if you like the genre, and it's rather short at around 4 hours. A rare and great touch: the options include a dedicated motion sickness menu that groups together settings like FOV etc... to help prevent it. My only real gripe is that once you discover clues, you can't view them directly from your inventory, you have to physically go back to where the clues are located to re-read them. Overall, though, still worth a look!

I completed the Co8 quests after about 40 hours so Im sadly finished with my ToEE adventures but all good things have to come to an end Total game time was 135 hours I wont repeat in detail what is fantastic about this game. Its the best adaptation of D&D ruleset and combat mechanics of any party based D&D game I have ever played and that creates the most exciting and challenging combat I highly recommend both Co8 and Temple + mods. Its not just the increased level cap and extra quests. Its the stability and how you can make rule changes that matter, for example you can remove Fog of War which I did for one hard battle As far as bugs were concerned, nothing significant except where I suddenly lost 80% of my XP for 2 party members after a hard battle on level 2. But I used console commands to restore this XP which was really simple I had a very frustrating battle during the Hickory Branch quest where you face 50 enemies. The problem was every turn you get hit by explosive runes that do force damage to your entire party and I assumed the enemy archers were responsible. I spent about 6-7 hours until I finally won this battle and tried about 6 times. I nearly raged quit. Afterwards I read a guide that mentioned the explosive runes are buried in the ground and its advisable to attack all the enemies from the left and not the normal right side of the field. I wish I knew about this prudent strategy before I spent all that time trying to avoid the rune damage The only criticism I have of this game is it doesn't have a complex or thought provoking narrative like PoE or any companion interaction and side-quests which I always enjoy because it adds depth to my RPG experience. So you dont really need to make any serious choices. But that's not enough to detract from its strengths ToEE gets a solid 78/100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system " and its highly recommended for anyone who wants to play a party based RPG where combat is its greatest strength

Ha, then maybe I'll wait to buy it until after your review of it?

1000xRESIST: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1675830/1000xRESIST/ It looks like a game, you move around in it like it's a game, there's a little gameplay here and there...but it's really actually a book - just one where you get to decide how much of the world-building and side-character text you get to indulge in (or not). And as it is a book, you the player have no agency - you are simply along for the ride of story of this world and the characters in it. When I first took a look at it, I did not have a good impression...but I ended up falling in love with it. I think it's one of those things where either you're gonna get into it and it'll be incredibly engrossing...or it'll be too odd and it won't click, and you'll just bounce off of it without understanding the love for it one bit. And that's okay. Something that this game helped me realize? I really hate mouth movements in 3D games. This game does not bother trying to animate characters' mouths, and instead is much more concerned about just expressions and characters being postured correctly for the moment with no regard for that sort of thing, and while it took just a little bit to get used to it in a highly detailed graphical style like this, HOO BOY, I like that so much than all those ugly-ass uncanny mouth and face expressions in other games that are trying to do their best (and failing miserably) to stay synced to voice-acting. I've never gotten used to how bad face-syncing is even decades into full voice-acting being a thing - face animations just aren't there yet to passably mimic actual human faces, and I'm really not sure if I'll ever be able to do anything except for looking away from the screen when I see it in action.

Goal nr.5/2026 achieved: July 21, 17:45 – After short vacation, I've decided to play another game from Hero of the Kingdom series. Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 2 from GOG. This time, the hero was a princess. When compared to previous games, I put my enjoyment of it in between part III and Lost Tales 1. From start it was on the level of first Lost Tales, but soon, it slowly started to show its flaws. The quests seemed to me to have a little bit less of variety, and also I find the writing to be the weakest in the series so far. On the other hand, there was absolutely no grind, and I had to start shop runs for money only in the last hour of the game, after encountering the first undead. Up until then, the money and items, which I've found during the course of the game, were enough for moving forward through the story without any worry. So after 6 hours, I've unlocked all achievements and defeated another villain.

It has been a long time

Then I don't know if Against the Storm is for you It has Beavers, Lizards, Harpies, Foxes, Frogs, and Bats

Against the Storm has no combat. You can manage the difficulty, so unless you play on something like Prestige 10 (like some idiots here with teddy bear profile pictures), you can ignore quite a few micro parts.

Please increase the radius of storage boxes My base isn't that big and it doesn't cover the whole thing.

After that other company stripped everything good out of Fallout for #4, hearing that Obsidian potentially got the rights back to make the next Fallout game gave me hope. For whatever it's worth, here's what I would like to see: 1) bring skills back. 2) perks that matter more than just combat. 3) actual builds. E.g. a stealth focused character won't be built to properly pick up a heavy weapon. 4) Don't throw power armor at us in the first 10 minutes. It should be rare and powerful endgame stuff if it's in there at all. 5) please don't do the thing from Avowed and Outer Worlds where the open world isn't really open but rather corridors disguised as open terrain. Go back to how New Vegas was in terms of the world. 6) allow real stealth. Not the "you can only stealth where we allow you to stealth with this special grass" nonsense from OW and Avowed. 7) did i mention bringing back skills already? Yeah. that. 8) please try to recapture the specific sense of humor that made Fallout FALLOUT. E.g. Fo1 and Fo2. I still remember a quote from the end credits of (I think it was F02) - "Bring in Marketing. I wish to taste of their unsavoriness as well." Tragic cards, etc. That other company sucked the life out of the game. (along with destroying almost all of the RPG aspects of it) 9) Please do not do the "Omg my baby is missing I have to go find my kidnapped baby - after I do these 4200 side quests" thing. There's no need for the main story arc to be super mega urgent time crunch. 10) please do NOT do the b-soft "level scaling" thing. When everything is always the same level as the player it absolutely destroys any feeling that you've advanced or made any progress. It eliminates the RPG side of the game and just turns it into an action shooter. Maybe i'm old, but I like it when you try to go into an area, get your butt handed to you and realize you're not high enough level for that place yet... then go back later and get revenge once you've caught up. That is fun. Everything always being your level is samey, generic, and lame.

Im 50 hours in ToEE and time for another update I cant keep singing the praises enough of the combat mechanics. Almost every single battle is interesting and several require a serious change of strategy. There are too many memorable events to cover so I will just discuss the main ones My party is now on level 6 and additional access to new abilities and spells adds even more variety and strategy to combat I initially entered the Temple through the Tower Ruins and faced a massive battle with bandits, mages and witches. But I was successful on my third try by using spells and there AOE. So spells like Fog Cloud and Glitterdust helped with enemy archers. And Charm Person is incredibly useful, seeing the main bandit wizard use fire magic on his comrades was hilarious The Tower took me directly to level 3 and I also found the well entrance near the burnt farm. So I started exploring level 3 before levels 1-2 and I was able to defeat enemies I met. Then I met Prince Thrommel who joined my party and initially I thought this was great but he is too powerful and he was undermining the fun in the risk of battle. But then when I left the Temple to sell loot in Hommlet he left my party anyway. But he did help clear the shadow area in level 3 which was very useful But now Im going back to exploring levels 1-2 and fighting the various elemental factions. I had to avoid the Harpy trap because my party keeps getting captivated endlessly but I think Silence should help? I will proceed back to level 3 once Im done with the higher levels

I've liked him since Omen 3, although more from Dead Calm, after. Jurassic Park ofc - Hunt From Red October etc. Guess it's that time where most of the then-famous I grew up with, who were typically 12-25 years older than myself, are all going to start appearing here. :/ Life is too short. Ah well.

All active/offensive abilities such as offensive spells (but also Carnage for example) get an accuracy bonus based on character level (+1 per level): https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/Accuracy#Abilities

The engine is incredibly easy to use and very powerful. Just because Bethsoft can't make good games, doesn't mean the engine is garbage. If the next Fallout game runs on Unreal Engine, it will be forgotten a few months after release. A new Fallout in the style of BG3 also crossed my mind, but IMO this is extremely unlikely. I also doubt they are given 5 years to develop the game. If it's going to be anything like in the past, we're probably seeing something in 2 years, max.

I do wonder, after all this time, if Obsidian’ll actually try something new with this opportunity, or if they’ll go (or perhaps are forced to go) the New Vegas route and make total conversion of the last existing game in the series. I mean, I’d rather see a fresher take than another clumsy Bethesda-shooter just written with some better sense of the franchise. Let Bethesda do the **** they do, and Obsidian do simethibg they do better than those clumsy FP-shooters. TOW and Awoved weren’t really top notch in that regard either, so do something else.

Ixion. This game is good despite its gameplay. The game has negative QoL mechanics, it's like they tried to make the game difficult by making the gameplay obnoxious. The simplest example being cargo ships which will go pick up a resource from a pile and if that pile has 1 unit of resource it will pick it up and go back to base to deliver it, instead of first filling its cargo limit from another pile before going back. But wait it's even worse than that. If another ship picks up that 1 unit that remains in the pile and a second ship was also going to that same pile, the second ship will visit the empty pile, not pick anything up because there is nothing there, and then return to base with nothing before going to the next resource pile. That is just one example out of many, but even taking that in to account the game is very addicting and fun to play. It's just that it could have been that much better...

Mirror in the Bathroom was great, but the only album of their I bought back then was the one that had this one it. I liked it a lot (the album) And of course, because.

Have you played Pentiment? IIRC you weren't particularly fond of lots of combat, so just your kind of game. Granted, it was always set up to be a more niche experience (art style, narrative, historical focus). I still think it deserved to go a little bigger. Btw, what's being done do id Software highlights how crazy this industry is. They didn't only make games, after all. They had one of the most experienced engine tech teams in the industry. In other words, major long-term assets. Which is something that Obsidian for instance don't have, didn't have even in the Black Isle days (without Bioware's Infinity Engine, most of their games as we know them now would have never been). Throwing all (or most) of that under the bus just figures. And that by MS -- for which gaming isn't the main business anyway. In other words, they could "afford" to keep those assets. Rather than axing them straight away.

Gotta love how much effort this President is expending to promote the adoption of renewable energy sources: The Iran war has pushed some countries away from oil and toward clean energy Keep up the good work! We couldn't have done it without you.

Beyond reason, post Starfield for sure. If that'd sold as hoped you could justify the profligacy with TES and Fallout. As it was it didn't sell as well as expected and had a poor fan and relatively poor critical reaction. A bit of a boot up the backside is more than justified. It is, really. Bringing in a moderate amount of money reliably with low overheads- and they should be low, download bandwidth is cheap as is shared MP infrastructure- is a perfect example of low risk. It should be a licence to print money; though maybe not as much money as they'd like. Kind of sums things up when 30mn subs isn't enough. That's 300mn/ month and 3.6bn p/a if everyone was on the basic plan. Each month every month, each year, every year. You'd think that would be enough, really. The irony when it comes to risk is that, say, a 20mn Fallout strategy game would be high risk, but a 500mn Fallout RPG could be seen as lower risk. In reality, it's obvious that the higher priced one is far more risky. (They clearly wanted a Netflix style defaultism for gamepass where people have the sub and don't seem to cancel no matter how many times the service is degraded and prices go up; and indeed sub numbers in total only ever seem to go up. For some reason, despite Netflix being, to be blunt, absolute rubbish. That approach only seems to work for Netflix, everyone else including MS tends to have a somewhat different experience where expectations of massive profits have not been realised)

Don't know if I would have loved a Fallout game by Larian, but it sure as hell would have had nice turn based combat, so there's that at least...

It’s been a while. Haven’t really been into Obsidian games since Deadfire and Pentiment. Saw the news on layoffs and Fallout, so figured I’ll check back on the old stomping grounds.

Finally got an appointment/surgery day for hubby, end of month.

Before Trumps second presidency I would have believed this is fake news ...but now Im not so sure. It could be real

Loved the strike series so this is great stuff!

Damn it, I could have saved $10 if I waited 12 years.

That's what happens to fragmented markets: There's fewer space for "one size fits all product". Same as in music and the decline of the omnipresent super star that everybody agrees on. Or as a wise dev once put it: "A game made for everyone is a game made for no one." Personally, I think that's a good thing. Whilst there's overall TOO many releases now even to keep track of, there is a game and a catalogue to build for pretty much everyone. Back in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, that plain wasn't the case. As the increasingly fewer monolithic publishers and even physical stores dictated what got funded, made -- and eventually played... RPG devs stopped making games like Baldur's Gate 'because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them', says New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity director Josh Sawyer | PC Gamer

But this also means that the game developers and publishers aren't solely to blame for where we are today. The gaming public bears a good proportion of the blame as well. People these days, generally, have ridiculously unrealistic expectations and demands, are very entitled, and are intolerantly opinionated (as in, everything should be what I want and not what someone else wants, or else ...!).

I hate when I buy something on steam and I forget to check if it's on gog. Guess now I found out how Steam refunds work...

I pretty much agree with him (he's talking about larger big-name publishers/devs). Quarterly report pleasing shareholders models, Covid period breeding more inflated expectations, short sighted decisions. Consumers having gazillions of games and backlogs to choose from vs. spending new/full-price. Consumers being fed up with various things (mass current loss of consumer trust), leading to much more "I'll wait for a year, when it's fixed/done and on sale" which cycles into not getting pleasing quarterly reports for new releases, and so on.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/137984-unique-helmets-lost-those-enchant-after-hexform-of-the-helpless-beast-irrevocably. Following up on this with findings from the above thread. I can confirm the loss of headgear enchantment is indeed part of the same bug! From several attempts of throwing a character at Sigilmaster Auranic with or without Stands of Favor, the headgear enchantments disappear only when neckless was equipped with the spell in effect. It does seem to be a bit of a luck based thing from what I have seen. Either you'll lose all your equipment except for the item that reduces hostile duration, or lose just the headgear enchantment. Though on one occasion I lost headgear enchantment and Strand of Favor. The good news is that since it seems stem from the same bug the fix I created seem to address it! 😁

Greetings Watchers, Today we are releasing patch 3.9.5.0 for Pillars of Eternity on Steam, GOG, EGS and Xbox PC. Patch Notes:Combat and Mechanics - Global Attack Speed and Reload Speed bonus provided by the One-Eyed Molina's Gold Fingered Spike-Flinger now works similarly to other Attack Speed bonuses granted by weapons. Combat and Mechanics – Turn-Based Mode Specific Increased the minimum initiative of Adragan actions in TBM. Seal type spells no longer disappear immediately when placed in or outside of combat. Trail of fire dropped by Fire Stag now appears and works correctly in the Turn-Based Mode. Cipher's Tactical Meld ability now correctly provides bonus Accuracy when attacking the same enemy as the target. Ancient Memory no longer triggers multiple times in one turn on characters with low Intellect. Spellstamina: Fear Aura enchantment of the Dragon's Maw Shield no longer causes the Fear Aura effect to trigger multiple times in one turn. Encounter by the Sacrificial Pit in the Endless Paths of Od Nua Level 2 can now be progressed properly. Same target accuracy bonus and other similar effects are now applied correctly in Turn-Based Mode. Xaurips during the encounter with the Adra Dragon, now aggro properly towards the Player's party. Visual and Audio AoE preview of the Twin Stones Druid spell now appears properly in the Turn-Based Mode. User Interface and Interaction Resolved an issue leading to excessive engagement message spam in the combat log in Turn-Based Mode. Threatening Presence no longer spams the combat log in Turn-Based Mode. Various “Active effects” have had their displayed values corrected in Turn-Based Mode. Several issues related to interacting with beetle-type enemies and their corpses no longer occur. Description of Veteran's Recovery now mentions the correct amount of Endurance gained per turn. It is now possible to disable the Turn-Based Mode combat start banner by using the ungated console command “ToggleTacticalModeBanner”. Interactive area of End Turn button in Turn-Based Mode now properly matches the button itself. Turn-Based Node can no longer be toggled during interactions and UI states where most of the player input is disabled. Warning now appears when trying to switch between combat modes during an encounter. Ongoing movement commands are now stopped after ending the turn in Turn-Based Mode. No Movement warning is now displayed when targeting the out of reach enemy/area with an attack or ability when out of movement in Turn-Based Mode. If you come across any issues, please contact us at support.obsidian.net Thank you for your continued feedback and support!